Wednesday night in DC, MIT professor Barry Posen took aim at Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy consensus, arguing for a guiding ethic of restraint, as opposed to the “liberal hegemony” currently endorsed by both Democratic and Republican elites.
The lecture, sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute and held at the Mayflower Hotel, is another piece of evidence pointing toward a meeting of minds between libertarians and foreign policy realists, neither of whom enjoy much sway in the GOP at present. The case could be made that they need each other: No voter is going to get excited by something called realism, but the non-interventionist foreign policy views of many libertarians are often not well articulated, and don’t enjoy much intellectual clout.
Rand Paul has realized this. A week ago in New York he rolled out his case for “conservative realism” at a dinner hosted by the Center for the National Interest.
The case for a more sober look at American power, as Posen tells it, goes something like this: The fall of the Soviet Union led to a moment of unprecedented global power for the United States. In the absence of significant enemies, we had the freedom and the duty to bring the world more in line with American values of freedom and democracy, even at the point of a gun. Today in Washington it is taken as a given that this preeminence must be maintained at any cost, which will become more burdensome as China and India continue to grow.
“The problem is that the world is resistant to our ministrations,” said Posen. China, which is much bigger and more productive than the Soviet Union, won’t be contained the same way we were able to contain the evil empire, bearing the vast majority of the cost. We would exhaust ourselves if we tried.
On a more granular level, Posen says ”you want to think hard before you knock over an autocrat. I have no love for these people, but they’re often sitting on a big wrestling match that wants to happen. They are the local 911.”
Recent events have taught this lesson painfully. We toppled Qaddafi, and got anarchy, lawlessness, and a government meeting on a Greek ferry. We toppled Saddam, and got ISIS.
This is all bad news for the neocons, many of whom, despite the chaos in Syria, still argue for regime change there. They seem to be nervous about this budding libertarian-realist alliance. [...]
Perhaps they are right to be nervous. It’s possible that what we’re seeing is the coalescence of a bona-fide conservative foreign policy counter-establishment. There is a lot of amorphous negative opinion out there over foolish wars, civil liberties, defense spending, but no organization or well-articulated alternative. That’s been one of Rand Paul’s big problems until now.
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A good question for committed anti-war lefties is whether they’d prefer Rand Paul to a Democratic Party controlled by “machine-gun-toting messiahs” like Samantha Power.
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